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- A third of all meetings in America are unproductive, according to a 2013 study.
- Unproductive meetings are usually caused by having too many people in the room, not having an agenda, or simply meeting too often.
- Successful executives like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs developed techniques to combat bad meetings — for example, Steve Jobs liked to have meetings with the fewest number of people possible.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Americans sit through some 11 million meetings every day. A third of those meetings are unproductive, costing companies $37 billion a year, according to a 2013 study.
When meetings go horribly wrong, it’s usually due to sloppy agendas, un-articulated ground rules, and having too many participants, among other basic structural mistakes.
Some of the most effective executives in history — from GM czar Alfred Sloan to Apple’s Steve Jobs to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — have personally run the meetings that invariably filled their calendars.
Here are the tips and tricks they’ve used to make meetings more productive.
Legendary GM CEO Alfred Sloan said little — then made follow-ups.
Wikimedia Commons
Alfred Sloan ran GM from the 1920s to the ’50s. During that time he led GM to become the world’s largest corporation — in the ’50s, GM held 46% of the US auto market and employed over 600,000 Americans.
Sloan is also credited with inventing modern corporate structure.
According to leadership guru Peter Drucker, the follow-up memo was one of Sloan’s go-to tools.
After any formal meeting — in which he simply announced the purpose, listened to what people had to say, and then left — Sloan would send a follow-up memo with a plan of action.
Drucker’s take:
[Sloan] immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of the meeting. In that note, he summarized the discussion and its conclusions and spelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including a decision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). He specified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for the assignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who’d been present at the meeting.
These memos made Sloan an "outstandingly effective executive," Drucker argues, and you might say they were a key to GM’s dominance of the 20th century.
Former Opsware CEO and Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz likes to have one-to-one meetings.
C Flanigan/Getty Images
Back when he was a CEO, Ben Horowitz led Opsware to a $1.6 billion sale to HP in 2007.
Two years later, he cofounded Andreessen Horowitz, probably the most sought-after firm in venture capital.
Horowitz, who spends much of his time mentoring young leaders, says that most important job for a CEO is to architect the way people communicate in a company.
The one-to-one meeting is essential to that process, he says, as it’s the best place for ideas and critiques to flow up from employees to management.
Here’s his take on how to run one:
If you like structured agendas, then the employee should set the agenda. A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance.
This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing. It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs.
During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10% of the talking and 90% of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk demands that people be super prepared.
REUTERS/Mike Blake
Musk has incredibly high standards. He has a reputation for firing people if they miss a deadline. So if you’re meeting with him at Tesla or SpaceX, you have to be ready.
In an April 2018 company-wide email obtained by Jalopnik, Musk had this to say about meetings:
Please get [out] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.
Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.
Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
What else would you expect from the most badass CEO in America?
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- The 10 worst productivity lies we tell ourselves, according to an expert who’s worked with CEOs, doctors, athletes, kids, and a Supreme Court judge
- The 50 most underrated colleges in America
- 10 books that will give new managers the self-confidence necessary to lead, motivate, and inspire their team
SEE ALSO: Why meetings, email, and ‘excessive collaboration’ are the unholy trinity of burnout
Source: Business Insider – dbaer@businessinsider.com (Drake Baer)